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The Price of Oil in Texas

By Lisa Margonelli January 17, 2007 9:02 pmJanuary 17, 2007 9:02 pm

In the history of accidents, the March 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City, Tex., oil refinery might have been another Exxon Valdez — a catastrophe that changed the way we perceive and regulate the industry. But the BP disaster hasn’t captured the public’s imagination the way the 1989 Alaska oil spill did, even though the explosion killed 15 people and injured 180 more. Yesterday James Baker, the fix-it man for both the Iraq war and BP’s safety record, released a 374-page report on how BP’s corporate culture contributed to the disaster.

The findings were harsh — pointing fingers at people at the highest levels of the company for not paying enough attention to safety — and they helped persuade John Browne, BP’s chief executive, who once was considered a model oil company executive, to resign. But the soul searching should go way beyond Browne.

Most of us speed past refineries, with their steel towers and scary flares, never stopping to consider what goes on inside. Daily, refinery employees manage high pressures and volatile chemicals while pumping out millions of gallons of gasoline. If you want to see what it looks like when those systems are dangerously out of balance, watch this video re-enactment of the Texas City disaster, made by the United States Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. It shows a minute-by-minute reconstruction of flammable liquids overwhelming the plant’s safety devices and eventually blowing up.
“What BP experienced was a perfect storm where aging infrastructure, overzealous cost-cutting, inadequate design and risk blindness all converged,” said Carolyn W. Merritt, chairwoman of the investigation board at a news conference in late October, cautioning that no company should consider itself immune from this kind of disaster.

That statement wouldn’t surprise the residents of Texas, who refine more than a quarter of America’s gasoline and are the largest onshore producers of both petroleum and natural gas. If you use gasoline, you owe Texas a debt of gratitude for shouldering so much of the burden of pollution and the risk of handling dangerous chemicals and fuels.

Harris County, which includes Houston, reports more toxic releases to the Environmental Protection Agency than any other county in the United States. The region along the Gulf Coast is home to 250 petrochemical plants, and in Houston alone, an estimated 78,000 kids go to school within two miles of a refinery or chemical plant. Between 1995 and 2005, 27 of the 48 Americans who died in accidents at major refineries were from Texas. Oil provides a paycheck for many Texas families, but refineries also pollute their air and water, and cause them to worry about their safety.

What’s it like to live near a refinery? Winifred J. Hamilton, the director of environmental health at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston, described it to me like this: “When I go to Texas City, people tell me about the incredible sound of the flares and the smell that they say gives them headaches. They say that being told to ‘shelter in place’ when there’s an emergency, particularly when they don’t know what’s going on, makes them anxious. And if the children are in school and the family members are home, putting wet towels under the doors, they’re separated from their children, and the stress and fear is immense. Even day-to-day life involves unusual worries — Is it safe to eat the vegetables in my garden?”

Hamilton said that despite the pollution produced by the refineries, many people in the area are ambivalent about leaving. “People have block parties and old trees,” she said. “They don’t want to move.” When I asked her about the Texas City accident, she said, “Well, headlines are about people who die, but the survivors often lose their fingers, toes, noses or ears, and they spend years in pain and at risk of infection. Some of them have to wear a ski mask. They’re lost in the statistics, basically, but their lives are deeply changed.”

While Californians vehemently oppose offshore drilling, and American environmentalists protest drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, residents of Texas can’t afford a not-in-my-backyard attitude. Texans sometimes excuse the odor of chemicals in their neighborhoods with the remark that it “smells like money.” To some extent they’re struggling to balance their livelihoods against unknown health risks. For the rest of us who drive, or for that matter, use lipstick, floor wax, plastic, antihistamines or any of the other products derived from petroleum at Gulf Coast plants, Texas is so far away we don’t associate it with our backyards at all.

“I try to tell people that if you’re getting gas from Texas, you’re probably polluting lots of neighborhoods,” said Dr. Neil Carman, an air quality expert with the Lone Star Sierra Club, “but there’s tremendous ignorance about where that gas comes from.” Carman said that the density of the Gulf’s petrochemical plants makes regulation difficult. In addition, many of the plants on the Gulf Coast are so old, it is difficult to update them to run as cleanly as new plants.

In any case, local emissions standards are extraordinarily loose, partly because of the petrochemical industry’s influence in local politics. A 2004 investigation by the Houston Chronicle found levels of toxic chemicals in some neighborhoods high enough to trigger a federal investigation — if they were found at a hazardous waste dump. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is now rewriting its allowable limits of toxic emissions, but has stated that the acceptable cancer risk is likely to end up at around 10 times the guidelines set by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The level of carcinogens released in the processing of a barrel of oil is higher in Texas than anywhere else in the country, said Eric Schaeffer, a former regulator for the E.P.A. who’s now with the Environmental Integrity Project. “A release of chemicals in L.A. gets a strong reaction from California regulators,” he told me. “The same release in Corpus Cristi doesn’t — there just isn’t the same tradition of enforcement.”

At the national level, too, we don’t always take air pollution that seriously. Spill chemicals in water, and under the Clean Water Act, you’ll have to pay for the cost of cleanup, plus a penalty. But with air pollution, which generally blows away, cleanup fees are lower, and the Clean Air Act allows companies to avoid paying penalties by arguing that a release was accidental. Schaeffer believes that if companies were assessed fines for all releases, including accidents, they’d be more likely to incorporate the cost of potential releases into their spreadsheets. That, in turn, would push them to invest in the equipment and personnel it takes to avoid small accidents. This would not only provide cleaner air in Texas, but also make refineries safer. One of the Baker report’s conclusions was that BP failed to adequately track hundreds of “near miss” leaks and spills, and thus were unable to prevent the disaster.

BP is paying billions of dollars to victims of the 2005 accident and their families, as well as fines. The rest of us should realize that the gasoline we use comes from someone else’s backyard.

I couldn’t agree more, as a former oil field architect and further oil facilities manager in Nigeria (OML 56) for TOTAL, I have expereined the same kind of inconciusness from the upper management.
By the end I had to quit under the presure of my bosses. Money money bad money at all price. Don’t look at what is going on in Affrica, middle east, former USSR republic, indonesia that is for what I know.
thank you

The infrastructure of the U.S. petrochemical refining industry is on a par with that of the the surface transportation industry–a hairsbreadth away from collapse. Much of the extreme danger to U.S. citizens from these ancient infrastructures cannot be corrected for several reasons, among the most egregious being the systematic underfunding of mandated federal inspection and regulatory agencies and the lobbying clout of the owner corporations that insures this situation. The petroleum companies regularly claim that they cannot keep up with gasoline/diesel/JP3 demand due to refinery breakdowns and/or downtimes for maintenance. It’s well known that there hasn’t been a major petroleum refinery built in the U.S. in over 30 years (consider the magnitude of demand increases!). The big oil companies claim this is caused by the potential effect on the bottom line of “over regulation”. Imagine! The bad old Bush/Cheney administration over-regulating the oil industry”! What’s at stake here is the clean air act, and old existing facilities have certain “grandfathering” rights to avoid compliance. Ask yourselves: What is Exxon/Mobil (or BP) DOING with its obscene 34.5 billion profits in 2006? Accepting the relatively minor costs of the death count caused by their breakdowns/air pollution as a “normal” cost of doing business, that’s what.